Make School Meaningful—And Fun! by Solution Tree

In Make School Meaningful—And Fun!, Roger C. Schank inspires high school administrators, teacher leaders, and curriculum planners to bring creativity and relevancy back to the classroom. Traditional curricula and school structures are becoming less effective over time, yet they continue to frame instruction and testing practices. By promoting new literacies, globally connected technologies, and career-based curricula, Schank offers educators strategies to personalize school experiences and prepare students for the future.

Using this guide, high school administrators and educators will:

MAKE SCHOOL MEANINGFUL—AND FUN!

Make School Meaningful–And Fun!

• Study the history of education philosophy and how it shapes high school curriculum practices • Consider how to tailor the curricula to mirror the skills and work of specific careers for modern classrooms • Learn the ten criteria that new curricula should meet to promote student learning • Explore the story-centered curriculum and the virtual experiential high school

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ROGER C. SCHANK

Solutions Series: Solutions for Modern Learning engages K–12 educators in a powerful conversation about learning and schooling in the connected world. In a short, reader-friendly format, these books challenge traditional thinking about education and help to develop the modern contexts teachers and leaders need to effectively support digital learners.

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2015943625 ISBN: 978-1-942496-21-2 (perfect bound) Solution Tree Jeffrey C. Jones, CEO Edmund M. Ackerman, President Solution Tree Press President: Douglas M. Rife Senior Acquisitions Editor: Amy Rubenstein Editorial Director: Lesley Bolton Managing Production Editor: Caroline Weiss Senior Production Editor: Christine Hood Proofreader: Elisabeth Abrams Text and Cover Designer: Rian Anderson Compositors: Rachel Smith and Abigail Bowen

Table of Contents About the Author. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v Preface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Chapter 1: Thinking About Student Goals. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 What Harvard Wants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 What Parents Want. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Setting Goals for School. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 How Children Get These Goals. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 How School Might Change as a Result. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

How We Can Change School. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Chapter 2: High Schoolâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;How It Got That Way. . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Chemistry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 History. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 English . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Biology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Physics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Foreign Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Mathematics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 Considering the Alternatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

Chapter 3: New Curricula for a New Era . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Ten Criteria for the New Curricula. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 iii

M A K E S C H O O L M E A NIN G F ULâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; A ND F UN! Learning by Doing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Student Choice for Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Meaningful Projects With Clear Goals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Regular, Realistic Deliverables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Designed Around a Profession . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Delivered on the Web . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Mentored by Teachers, Experts, and Parents. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Designed by World-Class Experts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Collaborative Teams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Communication, Reasoning, and Human Relations. . . . . . . . . . . 37

Five Types of Curricular Experiences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Mentored Simulations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Real-Life Experiences. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Stand-Alone Simulations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Online Collaborative Activities. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Learning-by-Doing Experiences. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

Chapter 4: Making School Fun. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 The Change We Need . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Role of the Teacher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 Emphasis on Success Rather Than Failure. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Relevance of Learning to Childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Goals. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 A Motivating, Story-Centered Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

How SCCs Motivate. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 How SCCs Encourage Learning by Doing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 Zookeeper SCC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Other Example SCCs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

Chapter 5: The Virtual Experiential High School . . . . . . . . . . 57 Proposed Curricula for the VEHS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Goals of the Curricula. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 The Future. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

References and Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

About the Author Roger C. Schank is one of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s leading visionaries in artificial intelligence, learning theory, cognitive science, and the building of virtual learning environments. Early in his career, Schank was a professor at Stanford University and Yale University. Later, he held a chaired professorship at Northwestern University, where he established the Institute for the Learning Sciences. He is currently CEO and founder of Socratic Arts, a company whose goal is to design and implement learning-by-doing, story-centered curricula in schools, universities, and corporations. To book Roger C. Schank for professional development, contact pd@solution-tree.com.

Preface By Will Richardson

In the 1960s and 1970s, Penguin published a series of what it called education specials, short books from a variety of authors such as Neil Postman, Ivan Illich, Herb Kohl, Paulo Freire, Jonathan Kozol, and others. All told, there were more than a dozen works, and they were primarily edgy, provocative essays meant to articulate an acute dissatisfaction with the function of schools at the time. The titles reflected that and included books such as The Underachieving School, Compulsory Mis-Education and the Community of Scholars, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Deschooling Society, and School Is Dead, to name a few. Obviously, the messages of these books were not subtle. Progressive by nature, the authors generally saw their schools as unequal, undemocratic, and controlling places of conformity and indoctrination. They argued, mostly to nonlistening ears, that traditional school narratives were leaving their learners disengaged and lacking in creativity and curiosity, and the systems and structures of schools were deepening instead of ameliorating the inequities in society. A number of the authors argued that universal schooling was a pipe dream from both economic and political perspectives, and schools, if they were to remain, needed to be rethought from the ground up. Reading many of these works now, it’s hard not to be struck by how precisely they describe many of the realities of today’s world. It’s inarguable that an education in the United States (and elsewhere)

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remains vastly unequal among socioeconomic groups and various races and ethnicities. The systems that drove schools years ago prevail and, in many cases, are less and less economically viable by the day. By and large, education is something still organized, controlled, and delivered by the institution; very little agency or autonomy is afforded to the learner over his or her own learning. Decades of reform efforts guided principally by politicians and businesspeople have failed to enact the types of widespread changes that those Penguin authors and many others felt were needed for schools to serve every learner equally and adequately in preparing him or her for the world that lies ahead. It’s the “world that lies ahead” that is the focus of this book, part of the Solutions for Modern Learning series. Let us say up front that we in no way assume that these books will match the intellectual heft of those writers in the Penguin series (though we hope to come close). However, we aspire to reignite or perhaps even start some important conversations about change in schools, given the continuing longstanding challenges from decades past as well as the modern contexts of a highly networked, technology-packed, fast-changing world whose future looks less predictable by the minute. Changes in technology since the early 1990s, and specifically, the Internet, have had an enormous impact on how we communicate, create, and most importantly, learn. Nowhere have those effects been felt more acutely than with our learners, most of whom have never known a world without the Internet. In almost all areas of life, in almost every institution and society, the effects of ubiquitously connected technologies we now carry with us in our backpacks and back pockets have been profound, creating amazing opportunities and complex challenges, both of which have been hard to foresee. In no uncertain terms, the world has changed and continues to change quickly and drastically. Yet, education has remained fairly steadfast, pushing potentially transformative learning devices and programs to the edges, never

Pr e f ac e

allowing them to penetrate to the core of learning in schools. Learning in schools looks, sounds, and feels pretty much like it did in the 1970s, if not in the early 1900s. Hereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the problem: increasingly, for those who have the benefit of technology devices and access to the Internet, learning outside of school is more profound, relevant, and long lasting than learning inside the classroom. Connected learners of all ages have agency and autonomy that are stripped from them as they enter school. In a learning context, this is no longer the world that schools were built for, and in that light, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a pretty good bet that a fundamental redefinition of school is imminent. While some would like to see schools done away with completely, we believe schools can play a crucially important role in the lives of our youth, the fabric of our communities, and the functioning of our nations. But moving forward, we believe schools can only play these roles if we fully understand and embrace the new contexts that the modern world offers for learning and education. This is not just about equal access to technology and the Internet, although thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a good start. This is about seeing our purpose and our practice through a different lens that understands the new literacies, skills, and dispositions that students need to flourish in a networked world. Our hope is that the books in the Solutions for Modern Learning series make that lens clearer and more widespread.

New Curricula for a New Era According to my view, anyone who would be good at anything must practice that thing from his youth upwards. —Plato

So, what can we build to replace what was handed down to us by Eliot and his cohorts and modified to make “plug-compatible” children by Bill Gates and the Common Core? We have what we need to build the education system of the future. It includes realistic simulations, online mentoring, real choices, and students working together to solve problems with the help of experts. Because of advanced technology tools, these experts can be physically present as well as virtually connected around the world.

Ten Criteria for the New Curricula Any new curriculum must have the following ten criteria.

Chapter 3

1. Learning by doing 2. Student choice for learning

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3. Meaningful projects with clear goals 4. Regular, realistic deliverables 5. Designed around a profession 7. Mentored by teachers, experts, and parents 8. Designed by world-class experts 9. Collaborative teams 10. Communication, reasoning, and human relations Let’s consider these one at a time.

Learning by Doing Students learn by doing; curricula consist of a series of projects inside a coherent story about life in some aspect of the real world. Why is this important? Because, as Plato said, this is how we actually learn. We learn to drive a car by driving, not by reading the manual. We learn to hit a baseball by swinging a bat. We learn to write by writing, speak by speaking, program a computer by programming, and make money by acquiring a valuable skill.

Student Choice for Learning Choice must be a staple. Students select the curricula in which they wish to participate. This is important because children have choices as they grow up. They select which games and toys interest them, which places outside the house they want to go, and who they want to play with. Then suddenly, without warning, all choice is taken away. They must sit still and pay attention to what the teacher is saying and learn various facts to be tested on. They don’t get to choose, and they don’t get to actually do much of anything. They do get to take tests—lots of

6. Delivered on the web

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them. Testing comprises much of the doing students do. Students are being trained to be test takers. How much sense does this make?

Meaningful Projects With Clear Goals Curricula must be designed around projects with clear, meaningful, and achievable goals. To say that learning involves meaningful goals would seem perfectly obvious if it weren’t for the fact that schools simply don’t follow this rule. People typically don’t learn something because they have to; they learn it because they truly want to (or they don’t learn it very well). Usually, they are trying to acquire a skill, whether it is persuading people to buy something, building something, or learning how something works. A meaningful goal is always behind it. When you hear ordinary people talk about issues in their lives, these issues typically involve money, work, family, or relationships. Their goals naturally come from these issues. Schools must address the goals that people actually have, not the ones that Charles Eliot wanted them to have.

No matter how many times teachers tried to teach me about music or art, I didn’t care. I tuned it all out. Would I have been better off if I had paid attention? I don’t think so. I paid attention to what interested me. I liked mathematics. I thought about mathematics when no one made me do it. In college, I discovered that mathematics was too abstract for me. Instead, I started thinking about computers. I made my choices by tuning out what I didn’t like. As a result, I was a C student and had trouble getting into my preferred colleges. The earlier a student gets to choose, the less likely he or she is to tune out. Students who are passionate about what they are doing stay in school, and they keep learning. Forcing students to study subjects they don’t care about achieves nothing.

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Regular, Realistic Deliverables

Why does this matter? Today’s school system is obsessed with tests. The reason for this is probably commercial. A great deal of money is made through testing. Texas spends $468 million a year to grade the tests administered in that state (Weiss, 2015). And that is just one state! Are these tests valid in any way? Preparing for these tests, which has become the obsession of teachers and principals everywhere, is certainly a good way to do better on other tests. So, if we accept that tests actually test something worth knowing, then the more testing there is, the more students will achieve better test scores. But why does this matter? It matters to the people who make money on testing. And it tends to matter to politicians who can say they improved test scores. Does it matter to the students? In the first class I taught each year at Yale and Northwestern, I would ask my students if they could pass the tests they took the previous year. Most agreed that they could not. But, they said, if they studied they could pass. What have we created? We have created a system in which students know how to cram information in order to pass a test. But the subject matter of those tests typically never comes up in students’ lives after the course, so, naturally they forget what they “learned.” The only valid tests are performance tests. However, the tests we use in schools are meant to be easy to grade, so we don’t test items that are subjective or involve doing. When I visit a doctor, I don’t care if he or she did well on the bone name memorization test in medical school. I care about how many cases just like mine he or she has treated in his or her career.

Students must submit deliverables related to each project for evaluation and feedback. There are no tests of inert knowledge, only performance tests.

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We must be sure that students are asked to perform and that teachers are good judges of what excellent performance looks like. Students learn to be expert performers through constant, mentored practice.

Curricula focus on actual professions, not academic subjects. As a society, we decided that intellectual subjects are the natural domains of schools. As a result, we teach what professors study, quite literally. One might ask why this is the case. The answer is that if you are going to attend Harvard and study mathematics or literature, Harvard professors don’t want to have to teach the basics to every entering student. Harvard accepts students who have shown some capability in these areas. This is a rational point of view if you are at Harvard. In high school, everyone is preparing for college, which means they are studying intellectual subjects. Does this make sense? Our society isn’t deficient in intellectuals. All societies need people to do the jobs that are available or to help create new jobs. There aren’t that many openings for historians. If high schools prepared students for real life rather than college, they would not teach subjects; and if they did, these subjects wouldn’t be the same as those taught at Harvard in 1892.

Delivered on the Web The new curricula must be delivered on the web. Students submit their work to mentors and receive feedback online. Why must the curricula of the future be delivered online? We are all used to school being a place where one is physically present. This makes sense in a world where everyone is studying the same subjects. But in order to allow a student who is interested in becoming a doctor to study medicine or a student who wants to be an aerospace engineer to study engineering, we would require more specialized teachers in the school building than is actually possible.

Designed Around a Profession

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It is impossible for a child’s every conceivable interest to be covered by teachers who are physically present. We must find another way.

Online curricula currently have a relatively unsavory reputation. This is due to the fact that most people building online curricula are trying to teach what always has been taught in the way it always has been taught. Therefore, textbooks, quizzes, and lectures find their way online in a form that is even worse than that of a traditional classroom. People have become naturally prejudiced against this. Consider a flight simulator, for example. Many pilots learn to fly by flying a simulated airplane. The United States Department of Defense felt that this was the best way to train pilots, and it spent the money to build flight simulators. Why wouldn’t a doctor simulator be the best way to train doctors, a courtroom simulator be the best way to train lawyers, or a construction site simulator be the best way to train construction site managers? Any real skill can be taught by simulation if the money is available to build high-quality simulators in which students can start simply, practice, and take on progressively more difficult tasks. What is missing from this scenario is the teacher. Am I proposing that students work alone in a simulator without teachers? No, absolutely not. Flight simulators were built decades ago when the web didn’t exist and online communication didn’t exist. Today, a teacher (actually, a mentor, or a teacher who is there to help rather

Schools, after all, have as their primary (and often unstated) purpose—day care. Schools make sure that children aren’t wandering the streets unsupervised and enable parents to work. In an era in which both parents are often working, this is becoming even more important. Simply putting curricula online and having students do their work whenever and wherever is probably an unlikely and undesirable outcome. Schools may well continue as day-care centers, but that doesn’t mean they have to teach in the same way that they have always taught.

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than instruct) could be available to answer questions and give helpful suggestions as students progress through a simulation.

Mentored by Teachers, Experts, and Parents Mentoring must be about helping students think through a problem without giving them the answer. Why is this important? Not only is the subject matter in question but also traditional teaching methods. People don’t learn just by listening, and they certainly don’t learn through temporary memorization. Teachers teach incorrectly, but it’s not their fault. Good teaching is oneon-one teaching. Parents don’t try to raise thirty children at once, nor do they teach their children at prescribed times with prepared lessons. Children learn from their parents in a natural way through conversation and observation. In the schools I am envisioning, teachers would have the time to engage in meaningful dialogue with students when students need the support of mentors. A teacher’s role also would include listening to student presentations about their work and reading their reports on a regular basis. Students would learn to speak, write, and reason clearly, skills that apply to every kind of job in the real world. A former classroom teacher could teach all of these skills in his or her new mentoring role.

Designed by World-Class Experts The new curricula must be designed by world-class experts from top universities and specific fields and industries. A pilot who also manufactured keyboard organs designed the first widely used flight

Teachers would still be needed to help frustrated students, offer new choices, assist with team conflicts, offer friendly advice, and maintain student safety. Teachers could also be mentors while students are attempting more traditional tasks, but they may not be capable if students are designing a 787 airliner. In that case, specialized expertise is available, but the expert may be in another state or even another country. Online delivery allows that kind of mentoring to happen.

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This only can be done in consultation with experts who can tell designers what kinds of decisions, behaviors, or achievements must be made in a given field, and can put students into situations where they might make the wrong decision, do the wrong thing, or attempt to build something and build it badly. The student, with the help of mentors, then has to figure out what went awry and determine how to fix it.

Collaborative Teams In the new curricula, students are encouraged to work in teams (virtual or live), learning to collaborate with others in order to produce results. Why should students work in teams? The first reason is because working on a computer is a very isolating experience. If that’s what a student does all day, the simulation really won’t work. But an equally important reason is that when we think about what is important to learn, working with and getting along with others must be a very high priority. Communicating and collaborating with others is a high

simulator. An airline manufacturer designed the second most widely used flight simulator after World War II (Fly Away Simulation, 2010). What does this mean? While education professionals would be helpful in designing new curricula, the critical players are practitioners in a given field or industry—for example, those who know what real courtrooms feel like and what happens in them, those who have started businesses and understand the issues involved, and those who have designed cities and understand urban design. Curricula designers must understand that making the student experience realistic and authentic is of utmost importance. The pedagogical issues revolve around capturing the students’ attention and putting students in situations that demand complex reasoning and explanation. The real purpose of any of these curricula is to require analytical thinking and decision making and acquire expertise in the service of achieving a desired goal.

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priority in life. Adults work in teams in nearly every job situation. Why these skills are overlooked in schools makes no sense. (When students actually do this, it’s called cheating.)

The overarching theme of a particular curriculum is not the most important goal for learning. In the end, students might want to become firefighters, zookeepers, doctors, or lawyers. They should have the opportunity to practice skills associated with these careers to find out if they like them. However, some skills are more important to learn than the particulars of being a firefighter or a doctor. Students must learn to solve problems and negotiate issues for themselves. They must learn to diagnose situations, make judgments, and create effective plans. They must know how to try out new situations to discover if they are working. They need to be able to convince people of their point of view. Students must learn each of these skills no matter what career they choose. Therefore, while each curriculum would focus on a professional skill of interest, it would also incorporate other skills and tasks that may well be more important. Each curriculum must be structured so that thinking, communicating, collaborating, and getting along with others dominate each day’s work.

Five Types of Curricular Experiences The previous ten criteria represent a point of view on what welldesigned curricula should look like. Now, let’s be a bit more specific. We can build five types of mentored curricular experiences: (1) mentored simulations, (2) real-life experiences, (3) stand-alone simulations, (4) online collaborative activities, and (5) learningby-doing experiences. There might be more, but we don’t want every curriculum we build to look the same. The reason is simple: curricula are designed differently because the learning is different and requires varied methodologies. Following are descriptions of five types of curricular experiences, along with some examples.

Communication, Reasoning, and Human Relations

Using this guide, high school administrators and educators will:

MAKE SCHOOL MEANINGFUL—AND FUN!

Make School Meaningful–And Fun!

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ROGER C. SCHANK